Languages

I started learning Cantonese two days ago. Actually learning might overstate it. I've spent three hours each of those days chanting meaningless sounds at various different tones. 6 of them, to be exact.
But day 2 brought something truly new. My teacher gave me my name. My Chinese name. It occurs to me that it's very strange that a man who saw me in a 15 person class for three hours would feel qualified to name me. It also occurs to me that I can't write my own name. He wrote out the characters for me, but I have no idea how to correctly reproduce them. But it's a beautiful name. Romanized (according to the Yale System, of course . . . that school is all of the place here): Fuh (for my last name--close enough, right?), Meihyan (the first character means beauty and the second character means grace; kindness).
On the flip side of not being able to write my own name, I was riding the KCR the other day when understanding English became a stumbling block. The woman sitting across from me was wearing a white t-shirt with pink letters that read: Save the apartheid boycott of the lesbian Nazi lettuce growers for Jesus of the nuclear whales. What?! Ok, I know that it's cool at home to have Chinese characters written on things and we have no idea what they say, nor do we really care. And the reverse is certainly true. But who would write that on a shirt? Someone who spoke reasonably good English (as many people do here) had to have written that shirt and decided it was a good idea. Is it offensive or just nonsense? I still haven't decided.